


Skies of Summer

by Elizabeth Culmer (edenfalling)



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Cloud Watching, Dreamsharing, Friendship, Gen, Male-Female Friendship, Missing Scene, Teaching, Team Fluff, Worldbuilding, cotton candy bingo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-28
Updated: 2014-04-28
Packaged: 2018-01-21 02:53:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,870
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1534907
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/edenfalling/pseuds/Elizabeth%20Culmer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ariadne knows she can build a dream; she folded Paris on top of itself, after all.  But translating that first success into a reliable skill is a little trickier than she expected.  Ariadne & Arthur friendship.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Skies of Summer

**Author's Note:**

> This story was written (extremely belatedly) for [Cotton Candy Bingo](http://cottoncandy_bingo.dreamwidth.org) Round One, in response to the prompt: _clouds_.

One of the hardest things about dream work, Ariadne discovered in the days after she ventured back despite her better judgment, was learning how to let go of her conscious control. It was impossible to design and impose _all_ the details of a setting, unless she wanted a blank, featureless room. If she tried, the elements she focused on inevitably warped into oddly plastic and indefinably false version of what she'd intended to create, after which the entire dream tended to break, assuming Arthur's projections didn't break through his safety barriers and force him to shoot them both awake before the dream's success or failure was rendered painfully moot.

After her fifth disaster of the afternoon -- a lecture hall loosely inspired by Professor Miles's room melting in long, colored streaks like crayons on a radiator -- Ariadne glared up at the ceiling in frustration rather than face Arthur's patient, amused calm. "There has to be some trick. My first dream didn't fall apart, even when I folded the city on top of itself. Neither did any of yours, with all your crazy paradoxes. You guys picked me because I'm an architect, but it's pointless if you don't tell me how to do my job. _What_ am I doing _wrong?_ "

"Your first dream worked because you were playing around instead of forcing things. Now that you're looking at dreams as an architecture project, you're trying too hard," Arthur said. "Let's take a break. Hold out your wrist."

Ariadne held out her arm to let him remove the cuff and needle, and swab more iodine across her skin. She pressed the cotton pad to the tiny puncture wound and made a face at the strange, itchy-ticklish ache where the needle had been dripping chemicals into her vein.

"Consciousness is a filter," Arthur continued as he unfastened the needle from the IV tubing and tossed it into a wastebasket. "We can only concentrate on a handful of details at once. The others fade from our active attention, but that doesn't mean they vanish. All that information keeps flooding in through our senses, and the subconscious keeps track just enough to notice if those background details are missing or altered. By trying to keep conscious control over the whole dream, you're editing out all the things you can't directly focus on. That's where you're going wrong."

"Are you saying I should stop trying to shape any details at all, let my subconscious mind do all the work?" Ariadne asked. "That doesn't make any sense. First of all, I'd probably end up building everything straight from memory, and second, there wouldn't be any structure to keep the projections out. What's the point of designing mazes if you can't force the dream to grow around them?"

Arthur placed the last coil of tubing into its housing and shut the PASIV case with a very final-sounding click. "You need to find a balance. Obviously the standard method isn't working, so I'm going to teach you a trick Mal taught me." He rolled down his shirtsleeves and snagged his overcoat from a nearby chair. "Grab your cardigan. We're going outside for a bit."

Ariadne swung her legs off the side of the plastic chaise longue she'd been lying on. She wasn't sure she wanted to learn anything, however indirectly, from the woman who'd stabbed her to death. But no, that wasn't fair. Cobb's projection probably had a lot more to do with grief and survivor's guilt -- or some other problem in his own head, of which she was sure there were _many_ \-- than with his actual wife. And Arthur had been a careful and thorough teacher so far, never blaming her or calling her stupid for her failures.

She'd keep trusting him for now.

"You have to shape a dream at least a little, or your subconscious will do it for you -- drop you into the middle of some scenario you've been stressed about, or into any bit of nonsense that happens to flash through your brain just before the Somnacin takes effect," Arthur said as he led Ariadne toward the rickety metal staircase at the far corner of the empty building he and Cobb had claimed for their team. (Ariadne still wasn't sure what sort of business had previously occupied the space, though she was leaning toward fashion design or some kind of independent print shop. Plastic chaise longues weren't standard factory equipment, and there were an awful lot of convenient drafting tables, hanging racks, and paint rollers lying around.)

"That's where the mazes come in, and the general setting and mood," Arthur continued. "You plan those. But then you have to step back and trust your subconscious -- and the subject's subconscious -- to fill in the outlines."

Ariadne buttoned her oversized sweater as she followed him up the creaking stairs. "I've never been very good at stepping back or letting go. And that can't be the answer to everything. What if I'm trying to build a dream about some place I have no experience of? Like a desert, or a forest, or the middle of the ocean? My subconscious would fill in stupid cardboard clichés that wouldn't convince anyone."

Arthur smiled as he unlocked the door to the roof, neatly hidden behind the building's façade and sheltered by a low steel overhang. "Watch a lot of documentaries, and keep your initial work to places and situations you do know inside and out. Then travel, or hire people who have had experiences similar to whatever you're trying to imitate so you can let _them_ fill in the details of your basic structure. But those are concerns for later on. Right now you're still having trouble with a basic room, so we're going to change our line of attack."

He pushed the door open and gestured for Ariadne to step onto the flat concrete expanse of the roof. Chill spring winds skittered fitfully through the sky, plucking at her hair and scarf.

Arthur's hair, of course, remained perfectly in place. Ariadne wondered idly what he'd look like if he didn't slick it back and down so forcefully. Younger, she thought. Also a lot less like a Depression-era gangster. Maybe even cute.

It was hard to think of Arthur in terms other than professional competence and vaguely unsettling skill with guns. She wondered what he thought about her, how he read her jeans and layers and scarves. She wondered what she might look like in a year or two if she fell deeper into this strange, science-fictional underworld. She wondered how Arthur had ended up in dreamshare.

Pointless questions if she couldn't learn to build a basic dream, of course. Ariadne shook her head, gathering her thoughts, and followed Arthur across the roof.

Arthur rested one hand on the low, iron railing around the edge of the building. "Look up," he said, and, following his own instructions, tipped back his head.

Ariadne looked up. The sky over Paris was largely unobstructed, no skyscrapers or mountains to cast shadows or block the view. A trio of birds -- pigeons? gulls? -- flapped past, their bodies blurry gray against the pale blue sky. A few puffy, off-white clouds scudded across the south horizon, harried by the wind -- apparently it was stronger and steadier further up.

"Okay. Now what?"

"Rooms are more complicated than they seem," Arthur said, seemingly non-sequitur. "Angles, shadows, textures, drafts, squeaky floors, the scent of dust and bodies and cleaning sprays -- there are a hundred tiny things to notice and reproduce. Rooms are also rigid and contained, which means it's easy to fool yourself into thinking control is necessary and possible."

"Which is what I've been doing wrong. Great. How do I fix that, and why are we staring at the sky?"

Something tapped Ariadne's ankle -- Arthur's shoe, she guessed. She swung her own foot in his direction, but hit nothing but air.

"We're going to build a different dream," Arthur said. "Strip it down to the bare minimum: earth and sky. Or in other words, grass and clouds. Both elements are as far from rigid as we can practically get, so your brain is less likely to assume control is possible. Right now I want you to watch the sky for a couple minutes so the general patterns are fresh in your mind. Then we'll go back indoors and you'll dream up an open field.

"The other useful thing about this dream," he added, lifting Ariadne's hand from her side and setting it on the railing when she wobbled slightly, "is that if there's nothing to change, there's no need to keep my projections out. They won't be looking for you."

"I could change the clouds," she said, playing devil's advocate.

"You could. But you won't, because that would defeat the purpose of the exercise," Arthur said. "Watch the sky, Ariadne."

She watched the sky. It was interesting how the color shaded from pale and bright near the horizons to a darker, more saturated hue at the zenith. A new flock of clouds shouldered their way into view, bigger and more ragged then the first set, now vanished. The sun was a fierce, bright circle she didn't dare look at directly, bleeding a sliver of sky around it nearly to white -- and yet for all that power, she could blot it out with her thumb held in the right position.

A pair of birds flapped overhead, much closer than the previous trio. These two were definitely pigeons, gray and plump, their necks iridescent in the midafternoon light.

"Do you want another minute?" Arthur asked.

Ariadne tipped her head back down, then tilted it from side to side to work out the crick in her neck. "No, I'm good. Grass and sky, don't force the details, just paint broad strokes and let my subconscious fill them in." She grinned at Arthur. "Hey. That sounds like a summer picnic dream. Should I add a blanket and some lunch? I can dream up a mean potato salad, or we could go continental and have cheese and wine."

"First let's make sure you can build the field," Arthur said repressively. Ariadne bit her tongue to hold back her instinctive protest -- just because she was sure she had the trick down now didn't mean she really _did_ , as all her failed attempts should prove.

But then Arthur's mouth quirked up in a mischievous smile. "I'm not saying no to a _second_ dream, of course. But a blanket and some lunch are easy additions. I'd like to see you add a good steady wind and some fancy kites to the basic frame, without setting off my projections. Think you're up to the challenge?"

"What do I get if I win?"

"The weather's not warm enough for a real picnic, but I think I can manage cheese and wine," Arthur said. "Or potato salad, if you'd rather, though that's not as easy to find in the middle of Paris." He turned and began walking back to the door beneath its low steel overhang. "Decide later, though. First you have to build the basic dream."

Ariadne followed him inside, mind fixed on green grass, scattered clouds, and a rainbow of fantastical kites dancing in a deep blue summer sky.

**Author's Note:**

> Ariadne won the challenge, by the way. Arthur had to make the potato salad from scratch, which was tricky since he only half-remembered his mother's recipe, but it turned out all right in the end. :-)

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Skies of Summer (Dare to Hope Remix)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4140654) by [momebie (katilara)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/katilara/pseuds/momebie)




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